J. R. Struthers

This book carries an ambitious title, but it's something of a mish-mash, much of it reprinted from other sources. At its best, it's brilliant, but in places, it's a little dated.

Consider Ray Smith, complaining about realist stories in "Dinosaur": "it was useful thirty, forty years ago." Smith criticizes writers adhering to a convention forty years out of date, and points to some newer writers:

"Some big dogs in speculative fiction: Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov. Coming big dog: Kurt show more Vonnegut, Jr. Prominent younger dogs: Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan."

Say, who is this Pynchon guy, anyway? It's now that you check and discover that this essay dates from 1972; within a few years, Brautigan would be written off (unfairly) as an anachronism. The irony is, of course, that a reader adopting Smith's stance today, in 2009, would be adhering to a convention thirty-seven years out of date. And thirty-seven is perilously close to forty. This is a history lesson.

But there are also some real gems here. "The Same Ticking Clock" by Carol Shields lucidly addresses the ever-popular controversy of gender. "What is Style?" by Mavis Gallant gets right to the point. Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings" is, of course, well known. And "Soaping a Meditative Foot," "Punctuation as Score" and "That Damn Clock Again" by John Metcalf are indispensable -- Metcalf is one of the collection's most lucid voices. show less